Today, the SOA Consortium declared success on its advocacy mission to help the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market business successfully adopt SOA by 2010. The SOA Consortium’s declaration is supported by recent industry research, the high value case studies submitted to its case study contest, and industry momentum around business and technology strategies that are dependent upon a SOA foundation.
From today’s press release:
“When the SOA Consortium began, SOA was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies,” said Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium. “As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.”
According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte, “the term ‘SOA’ was coined by Gartner, and Gartner published the first reports on it in 1996. However, widespread mainstream adoption only appeared after 2005. SOA is a durable change in application architecture, like the relational database and graphical user interface. It is the natural evolution of distributed computing — it is distributed computing done right. SOA is already the dominant architectural style for business applications. Virtually all CIOs are somewhere on the road to SOA, either starting or far along. SOA principles are timeless; no replacement is in sight.”
In a recent conversation with Joe McKendrick, Forrester’s Randy Heffner spoke of SOA adoption levels that match the SOA Consortium’s goal of 75% adoption rates by the Global 1000 by 2010.
“By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that’s folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they’ll be using SOA,” Randy continues. “When we asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’ roughly 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There’s another 30 to 40% that said, ‘It’s provided less than we expected, but still enough benefit that we’re expanding our use of SOA.’”
Interestingly, in that conversation, Heffner pointed out the greatest success comes from business-driven SOA approaches, exactly what the SOA Consortium has been advocating from the onset.
“What do the 25% moving full force into SOA have in common? “They’re treating SOA as a business-design concept,” Randy says. “That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you’re building, the methods that you put around it.””
In addition to declaring victory, the SOA Consortium announced its future plans to merge with OMG’s BPM Consortium:
“The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Consortium, which also ties in with the Business Ecology™ Initiative. The Business Ecology Initiative is focused on erasing the constraining lines between business and Information Technology (IT) so that IT becomes a ubiquitous, integral and vital asset to the company and leads decision-making, structural change and enterprise-wide quality initiatives, drives efficiency and revenue, and provides measurable, clear return on investment.”
SOA Consortium Activities and Transition
Timing: The merger between the SOA and BPM Consortiums will be completed by 2009 year end. The first event of the merged BPM/SOA Consortium is the BPM and SOA in the Clouds Symposium, to be held December 8-9, 2009, in Long Beach, CA. Organizations and individuals interested in participating in that program should refer to this open call for participation.
Working Groups: With the completion of the 2009 SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest, the Executive Suite SOA working group has completed its charter.
SOA Community of Practice is working on an “Everyday SOA” paper that describes the key concepts in our services, portfolios, management units and IT landscape diagram. The group intends to deliver the paper in December 2009.
The Enterprise Architecture in the 2010s working group is working on a discussion oriented position paper on how a formalized business architecture contributes to Business and IT success.
SOA Consortium Publications: All SOA Consortium publications (papers, podcasts, presentations, blog posts) will remain available to the public at their current locations. This includes the forthcoming working group papers.
Consortium Leadership: The joint BPM / SOA Consortium will be managed by Karen Larkowski, current program director of the BPM Consortium and General Manager of the Business Ecology Initiative.
Thank You!
On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the SOA Consortium. This long list starts with our members and sponsors, and includes all invited speakers, executive summit and symposium attendees, our pundit friends (analysts, press, bloggers, thought leaders), the OMG team, and every SOA practitioner who raised the bar (and value) in his/her organization from SOA as “just a bunch of web services” (JBOWS) to SOA Means Business.
[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my firm, Elemental Links].
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